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"A down-to-earth, inspiring book about the American promise fulfilled." -President Bill Clinton"Fascinating . . . . Made me wish I had been born in the Bronx." -Barbara Walters

A touching and provocative collection of memories that evoke the history of one of America's most influential boroughs-the Bronx-through some of its many success stories

The vivid oral histories in Arlene Alda's Just Kids from the Bronx reveal what it was like to grow up in the place that bred the influencers in just about every field of endeavor. The Bronx is where Michael Kay, the New York Yankees' play-by-play broadcaster, first experienced baseball; where J. Crew's CEO Millard ("Mickey") Drexler found his ambition; where Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dava Sobel fell in love with science; and where local music making inspired singer-songwriter Dion DiMucci and hip-hop's Grandmaster Melle Mel.

The parks, the pickup games, the tough and tender mothers, the politics, the gangs, the food-for people who grew up in the Bronx, childhood recollections are fresh. Arlene Alda's own Bronx memories were a jumping-off point from which to reminisce with a nun, a police officer, an urban planner, and with Al Pacino, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, Maira Kalman, Bobby Bonilla, Mary Higgins Clark, and many other leading artists, athletes, scientists, and entrepreneurs-experiences spanning six decades of Bronx living. Alda then arranged these pieces of the past, from looking for violets along the banks of the Bronx River to the wake-up calls from teachers who recognized potential, into one great collective story, a filmlike portrait of the Bronx from the early twentieth century until today.

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EXCERPT

Foreword

A few summers ago, my husband, Alan, and I were at a friend's house on Long Island, having predinner snacks and drinks, when I heard the words ". . . in the Bronx," said by Millard ("Mickey") Drexler, whom I'd met for the first time minutes before.

"Are you from the Bronx?" I asked.

"I'm from the Northeast. Barnes and Arnow Avenues," Mickey answered.

"You're kidding. Which building?"

"The Mayflower," he said.

"That's unbelievable! That's my building."

We tried to figure out why we hadn't met when we were kids. The Mayflower has ninety-six apartments. That's a lot of people, but the age difference (I'm eleven years older) was probably the biggest factor. When I was in high school Mickey was a toddler. That age gap disappeared completely when we talked nonstop like long-lost friends at dinnertime, deciding that it would be fun to go back to the Mayflower together.

So a few months later we went, new buddies revisiting our old building. Alan, Mickey's cousin, and a few of Mickey's longtime friends from the neighborhood came with us. It had been well over fifty years since either Mickey or I had lived in the Mayflower and thirty years since I had last visited. Would Mickey be able to see his old apartment? (No. No one answered the doorbell when he rang.) What did the Mayflower look like now, seen with our grown-up sensibilities? (On the outside, the same as ever. A six-story, tan and brown brick building, taking up half a city block.)

Mickey, chairman and CEO of J.Crew, led the way inside, the rest of us following. The lobby looked stark--a big contrast to my upscale Manhattan apartment building, with its lobby furniture, area rugs, and walls hung with art. The simple Mayflower interior served as a pointed reminder of the unexpected turns my life had taken. Still, I felt totally at home seeing the familiar, worn terrazzo stairways and floor of the old building, which triggered vivid childhood memories. Energetic girl on a rainy day, running and jumping in the hallways. Bouncing a ball. Noises echoing. Typical working-class Bronx Jewish first-generation kid. Me. I clearly saw and heard myself as that ten-year-old girl again, tossing my beloved Spaldeen ball.

Mickey and I began comparing notes about our families and our oh-too-small apartments. I was fascinated by his stories--of his aunt Frances and how she became his renegade role model; of how, when he attended the Bronx High School of Science, he first started getting knowledge of lives different from his own. Lives where some kids even had their own bedrooms and where the family expectation was that the children, without a doubt, would go to college. Standing with Mickey, a picture of confidence and success, in our shopworn surroundings, both of us excited about comparing stories about our pasts, started me wondering about other interesting and accomplished people from the Bronx. What were their stories? What were their childhoods like? Who influenced them? How did they find a place for themselves in the larger world, the one beyond their own Bronx neighborhoods?

The idea for Just Kids from the Bronx was beginning to hatch.

I started out cautiously by interviewing only friends. Mickey was among the first "kids" I talked with. Two longtime pals of mine, the producers Martin Bregman and David Yarnell, were also delighted to be included in my project. Regis Philbin, both a friend and a wonderful storyteller who lives down the hall from me in our Manhattan building, eagerly said, "I'll be happy to talk to you. I had a great childhood in the Bronx." The enthusiasm they all showed for the project, along with the comic adventures described in those initial interviews, launched this book. Friends then recommended friends, and acquaintances mentioned names they had recognized but didn't know personally--"Did you talk to So-and so?" I knew my growing helter-skelter list of names excluded many who were worthy and interesting, which meant this book was not to be a comprehensive history of all the great people of the Bronx. But happily, this informally gathered group hinted at the actual changing demographic of the borough over the years, which went from being predominantly Jewish, Italian, and Irish in the earlier part of the twentieth century to the current majority populations of African Americans and Hispanics, all of them sharing some pride in the borough that helped raise them. When I talked with Joel Arthur Rosenthal ( JAR), the only living jewelry designer to have a retrospective of his work at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, he said, "I'm glad that you're doing a book about the Bronx. I'm sick and tired of hearing about Brooklyn."

I edited the conversational interviews, taking care to preserve each person's own wording. I arranged the material chronologically, so the differences and similarities in each person's life, along with the changes in the Bronx itself, would be more apparent. As the volume of candid, personal stories grew, I found I was deeply touched and gratified by the trust these wonderful Bronxites had in me, basically a stranger to most of them.

I became riveted as the three graffiti artists of Tats Cru told of their exploits in the 1970s and '80s, and what it meant to them to have people see their art on the outside of the number 6 train, rolling from the Bronx all the way through Manhattan, into Brooklyn, and then back again to the Bronx. I was transported by Al Pacino's lyric description of the sounds of the world on his roof in the 1940s: "And at night--at night, there was this cacophony of voices, especially in the late spring to late summer. You would hear the different accents. We had them all. There were Italians, Jews, Irish, Polish, German. It was like a Eugene O'Neill play."

I laughed, with total surprise, when David Yarnell told me about his risky exploits in the '40s, secretly growing marijuana in Bronx Park. Teenagers did things like that then? And then there was the eight-year-old Ken Davidson, in the '50s, playing with his young band of buddies in the rocky, empty lot next to their apartment house, setting fires--literally playing with fire, despite his mother's warning, "You could burn your eyes out."

I was moved and informed by Neil deGrasse Tyson's descriptions of his experiences with racism when he was an innocent and unsuspecting preteen. Similarly, I was appalled by the not so subtle racism that Joyce Hansen encountered in high school when her college guidance counselor said college was for smart kids and therefore not for her.

And who knew that the Bronx River was home to an important population of giant snapping turtles? For Erik Zeidler, born in 1991 and still living in the Bronx today, exploring the Bronx River "was like opening presents when you're not sure what the present will be, whether it's going to be something you really want or nothing. Seeing and finding these giant turtles in the river is a present I'll never forget."

Hearing Erik talk about the turtles in the Bronx River reminded me that there is more parkland in the Bronx--25 percent of the place--than in any other borough of New York City. I was lucky enough to grow up about seven blocks away from Bronx Park, where the Bronx River flows, and which is also home to the world-class Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden. I was naively happy then and am humbly grateful now that, although I lived in a more or less urban community, I could explore the park, which first sparked my abiding love of flowers.

Sometimes out-of-town friends ask, "The Bronx. Exactly where is it?"

"You know," I say, "the Bronx is up, the Battery's down, like in the Comden and Green lyrics."

The Bronx is the northernmost of New York City's five boroughs. It was incorporated into the city at large in 1898, and it is the only borough on the mainland. The other four boroughs are either islands or attached to Long Island.

The Bronx got its name from one of its first settlers, a seventeenth-century Scandinavian named Jonas Bronck, whose lineage has been traced to Sweden and Denmark. He arrived in New Netherland in 1639, farmed some six hundred acres in what is now the Mott Haven section, and his tract was known as Bronck's Land. The river ran south of Bronck's Land and, with a change in the spelling, the river and eventually the whole borough were named after him.

The separate Bronx villages that arose long after Jonas Bronck's life and times evolved into neighborhoods . . . communities that were like hometowns. And as in other hometowns across the country, the dwellers knew most everyone and most everyone knew them. Though the people whose stories I listened to for this book came from many different neighborhoods and grew up in different decades, all of them came from places where parents and neighbors, schools and teachers, stores and storekeepers, houses of worship and clergy were important parts of their lives.

By the time I finished editing the more than sixty interviews, from ninety-two-year-old Carl Reiner's to twenty-three-year-old Erik Zeidler's, I was delighted to see an additional narrative emerging, one of changing decades and disparate times linking arms with one another. Children of Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants giving way to children of African American, Puerto Rican, and Dominican newcomers, and I felt moved and connected to them all.

During World War Two, Avery Corman played stickball in the streets, using the simple treasures of a Spaldeen ball and a broom handle for a bat. Even though I was a girl, and girls didn't play stickball then, those were my years of carefree playing in the streets too. Years later, similar games continued with even poorer kids creating their ball out of recyclables. As hip-hop's Grandmaster Melle Mel, born Melvin Glover, told it, "We'd take a milk container and a soda bottle and wrap the soda bottle in newspaper and stuff the soda bottle inside the milk container and shape it like a football." Yes! I could imagine doing that as well, if I had to.

For more than a hundred years the Bronx has been associated with the Yankees, the Bronx Bombers. And across the generations so many Bronx kids, me included, cheered them on, with many of the boys dreaming of playing pro ball. Bobby Bonilla, who spoke of his "indescribable love" for his supportive father, was able to realize his baseball-player dreams. And Michael Kay, fueled by an intense love of the Yankees and by his own resourcefulness, figured out early on how to get involved. "I was practical and rational, even as a nine-year-old," he told me. "If I'm gonna be part of the Yankees, I'm gonna be that broadcaster! So I'd interview my friends with a tape recorder." Michael Kay himself hit a metaphorical home run when he grew up to become a sports journalist and Yankees broadcaster.

The bronx storytellers in this book have found their niches in the fields of religion, law, education, entertainment, business, finance, science, medicine, government, politics, sports, acting, music, drawing, photography, architecture, graphic design, journalism, cartooning, writing, and dancing. Both in spirit and in fact, with their contributions to the larger community, they exemplify possibility. I am so grateful for what started out as a lark, just a fun trip back to the Mayflower. It led to one of the richest experiences of my life: the meeting of the people in and the making of Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was, An Oral History.

MEDIA

Watch

Arlene Alda, Alan Alda, Regis Philbin, and TATS CRU at the 92nd St. Y

The Bronx is where Al Pacino, Carl Reiner, General Colin Powell and so many other leading artists, athletes, scientists and entrepreneurs spent their formative years. Some of the Bronx’s favorite sons and daughters get together to reflect on stories from Arlene Alda’s new book, Just Kids from the Bronx. Beloved TV personality Regis Philbin, actor, director, screenwriter, playwright and author Alan Alda, and members of TATS CRU, the groundbreaking Bronx-based group of graffiti artists turned professional muralists, join Arlene to share memories of where it all began. Join them for an indelible portrait of the Bronx—and of America—from back-in-the-day to modern times.

Reviews

Praise for Just Kids from the Bronx

“A complex, compelling oral history.” —The Wall Street Journal

“More than 60 evocative oral histories . . . Just look at the angelic faces captured in the photographs that accompany each of the essays and ponder the question she [Arlene Alda] poses: 'How did they find a place for themselves?'” —The New York Times

“A loving portrait of a borough . . . Every story is a gem.” —The Huffington Post

“A nostalgic, sober and touching look at "Da Bronx" . . . will make you laugh and cry . . . . The four years it took to complete the book were worth the time; the project started "as a lark," and the end result is a home run, just like the kind Bobby Bonilla (also in the book) knows well.” —Philadelphia Examiner

“An amazing cross section of personal stories that takes the reader through the Bronx in the eyes-and the words-of some of the borough's most famous sons and daughters.” —New York Daily News

“A fabulous collection of 65 brief oral histories . . . . There are few readers who won't be touchedby this affectionate look backward, which is as much about the universal state of childhood as the specific borough of the Bronx.” —Publishers Weekly

“Whether it was the women's changing room at Loehmann's department store, riding a bike to Pelham Bay Park or running to an apartment block to fetch someone for a telephone call at the corner store, living in the Bronx made an impression on all of them as they worked their way up the American dream ladder. . . . Entertaining and informative cherished memories from a diverse group from the Bronx.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Arlene Alda must be a great listener because all kinds of amazing people tell her remarkable things in Just Kids from the Bronx. No matter where you grew up, you'll find this a down-to-earth, inspiring book about the American promise fulfilled.” —President Bill Clinton

“Reading these interviews is akin to sitting on a stoop or a rooftop in any teeming Bronx neighborhood while voices with various accents, telling tales of various triumphs and adventures, rise up from the streets. Just Kids from the Bronx is both a cacophony and a chorus: a diverse collection of childhood memories that together form the singular, and very American, story of a remarkable place.” —Alice McDermott, National Book Award for Fiction winner and author of New York Times bestselling novel Someone

“The childhood recollections in Arlene Alda's fascinatingJust Kids from the Bronx run the gamut from surprisingly funny to painfully shocking. For anyone anywhere who has wanted to achieve their heart's desire, Just Kids from the Bronx shows the early days of successful risk takers from that borough who have done it, each in his or her own way. Made me wish I had been born in the Bronx.” —Barbara Walters

“In these funny, intelligent, generous-spirited reminiscences, an extremely diverse group of Bronxites pay tribute to the borough where they were raised. Many of these are rags-to-riches impresarios whose riches are better known than their rags. Here, they give voice to the place that made them and in doing so, they make you fall in love with the Bronx, and with the resilience and moxy it seems to have bred in its sons and daughters. This is an enchanting collection.” —Andrew Solomon, New York Times bestselling author of Far From the Tree and National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon

“I was mesmerized reading about the childhoods of celebrities and leaders in fields from art to science, revealing the roots that launched their journeys from humble beginnings in the Bronx to extraordinary success. An eye-opener into what drives the creation of remarkable lives. I will long remember this wonderful book.” —Walter Mischel, author of The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control, Professor of Psychology, Columbia University

“Among the wonders of Arlene Alda's wondrous book is the stunning quality of the storytelling. Just Kids from the Bronx is a Bronx tale, to be sure--a collective picture of a place characterized by citizen yearnings to be elsewhere and the glorious discoveries and self-discoveries that come with staying put. But the parts that go into this whole are equally rich as pieces of literature. Nearly every one of these offerings, including the author's own, is a little work of art, each contributor foraging for the meaning and the music of a life. The result is America in a borough--at once hopeful, dangerous, regenerative, tough, joyous, and in the end, beautiful.” —Roger Rosenblatt, New York Times bestselling author of Making Toast and of The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood

“A terrific oral history . . . . Of the thousands of books I've read, this is the one I wish I had written. [But] I'm not claiming that I would have done it as well as Arlene Alda. . . . Of interest even to those who were not lucky enough to grow up Bronx.” —The Star-Ledger

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Arlene Alda

Arlene Alda graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hunter College, received a Fulbright Scholarship, and realized her dream of becoming a professional clarinetist, playing in the Houston Symphony under the baton of Leopold Stokowski. She switched careers when her children were young and became an award-winning photographer and author who has written nineteen books, including Just Kids from the Bronx. She is the mother of three daughters and the grandmother of eight. She and her husband, actor Alan Alda, live in New York City and Long Island.